from the for-the-encouragement-of-learning dept

As we've pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled "for the encouragement of learning." Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it's frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.

The publisher has hired the piracy protection firm Digimarc to police the internet for articles that are posted in the wild. As a result, universities all across the globe were targeted with takedown notices, which were also sent to Google in some cases.

The list of rogue researchers is long, and includes professors from MIT, Stanford, Northwestern University, University of Washington, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison and many international universities.

Yes, basically, ASCE has declared that its own academic authors are a bunch of pirates. If you're a civil engineer, now is the time to start looking seriously at alternatives for publishing beyond the ASCE. Declaring war on the academics who provide you all of your content for free, just seems like a bad idea.

Torrentfreak notes that it appears that some universities have resisted these takedown demands. Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley still have the works in question up. Other schools, however, have quickly caved in. University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas-Austin appear to have pulled down the works. Because, you can't support the progress of science if your damn academics are giving away their works for free... instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for access to basic knowledge and research.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The education industry seems to be ripe for disruption. Although it's undeniable that higher education and advanced technical skills are correlated with higher salaries, more and more parents and students are questioning the real value of college. If college is merely another step in the process towards applying for a job, some folks think colleges should be a bit better about actually being able to match employers with recent graduates. On the other hand, if college is more about making social connections and laying the foundations for a rewarding life, perhaps acquiring hefty student loans to do so isn't the way to go for that. Here are just a few links on getting a college education.

from the gyre-and-gimble-in-the-wabe dept

At the beginning of the year, Mike pointed out the strange and funny tale of Navin Kabra, an entrepreneur in India. Kabra started wondering if the requirement frequently placed on students in India to have two papers "published" at various conferences was little more than a huge scam, designed largely to get students to pay the fees for the submissions and the conferences. Despite claims that these works are "reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology," Kabra didn't think they were actually even being read.

To go about proving his theory, he started using the science gibberish-generating SCIgen app to submit papers to conferences. It's worth noting he didn't even try to make the papers sound coherent or logical, burying entire paragraphs referencing things like The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy or using dialogue from movies like My Cousin Vinnie. In numerous spots within the papers he clearly admits that a nonsense generator is writing the text:

"As is clear from the title of this paper, this paper deals with the entertainment industry. So, we do provide entertainment in this paper. So, if you are reading this paper for entertainment, we suggest a heuristic that will allow you to read this paper efficiently. You should read any paragraph that starts with the first 4 words in bold and italics – those have been written by the author in painstaking detail. However, if a paragraph does not start with bold and italics, feel free to skip it because it is gibberish auto-generated by the good folks at SCIGen."

His two bogus papers were accepted (one he paid to have published), and Kabra hoped at the time that his experiences would build awareness of the issue. Apparently that hasn't been the case. As it turns out, the practice isn't just occurring in India -- it's happening everywhere, and has been seemingly spreading for some time. This week it was revealed that just two publishers, Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), had published more than 120 bogus papers packed with nonsense:

"Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbe, say that they are now removing the papers."

Labbe has one-upped Kabra's exposure attempts by also publishing fake research of his own; research that helped him fairly easily boost his reknown in the Google Scholar database:

"Labbe is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see pdf]. Labbe showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare's h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world's 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbe's work, boosting their own citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long lists to their own previous work."

He's taken things one step further, creating a web-based program to help publishers scan for SCIgen gibberish, the technical specifics of which he has published with Springer. With this story now starting to see broader traction, it's probably safe to assume publishers are quietly pretty busy reviewing the archives to determine just how embarrassed they should all be. We've essentially just witnessed the evolution of a new generation of cat and mouse bullshit creation and detection, something somebody should clearly write a preferably-factual and coherent research paper on.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The National Science Foundation, which funds a lot of basic research at American colleges and universities, is facing a budget cut of $283 million this year, eliminating (up to) ~1,000 research grants. It's a shame because over the years many NSF-funded projects have resulted in discoveries that have turned into commercial products with significant benefits to society. Unfortunately, for people outside the scientific community, it's easy to overlook these impacts when trying to decide where to cut spending. Here are a few examples of why basic science deserves some respect.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Scientific publishing has been a lucrative industry in recent years, even though scientists have faced increasing competition over limited funding. The publish-or-perish academic model may be contributing to an increase in scientific fraud, but maybe the increased accessibility of digital journals is simply making it easier for honest mistakes to be caught. The scientific method is supposed to weed out incorrect conclusions, but there may be a lot of wasted effort as scientists try to replicate experiments that are just completely fictitious. It gets harder and harder to make decisions based on evidence -- if there is growing uncertainty that any evidence can be trusted....

Apparently, the UK is notorious for its bad science journalism. We're talking "labvertisements" -- industry/product-funded science stories about (possibly fake) studies conducted by questionable scientists with dubious methods. But at least they're honest about it and take their research with a huge grain of salt. The US just re-packages many of these reports as serious news. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Getting a tenured professorship position has been the dream job of a multitude of highly-educated researchers, but as funding cuts have hit public universities, these careers aren't looking as attractive as they once did. The academic system may soon be looking at some significant changes if the promise of tenure no longer serves to compensate underpaid educators. Here are just a few complaints about the current system, and feel free to suggest some solutions in the comments....

from the that-seems-backwards dept

Hollywood's admission last week that its campus piracy stats were bogus raises an interesting question: why have colleges been so quick to roll over and accede to Hollywood's demands? Greg Sandoval points out that universities could have done their own studies a long time ago and had hard numbers to dispute the industry's accusations. If, as now appears to be the case, colleges are only responsible for a fairly small fraction of illegal file sharing, it makes the industry's demands that academia bend over backwards to help Hollywood in its anti-piracy fight a little unreasonable. The really screwy thing about this is that the movie industry is a relatively small part of the American economy. The industry's revenues in 2006 were just $42 billion. For comparison, Harvard alone has an endowment of $35 billion, and altogether the higher education sector has assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If they chose to stand up to Hollywood's bullying techniques, they would have little trouble mounting an effective legal defense. And given that Hollywood seems determined to paint students—academia's customers—in the worst possible light, it seems only appropriate that colleges be more proactive about countering unfair negative stereotypes of college campuses.